The Inner Life

Any adept in the world of meditation will be familiar with the existence of an 'inner world'. The 'outer world' is one we know the existence of only because the mechanics of manifestation provide a barrage of sensory stimulation. As it turns out this barrage of stimulation creates a remarkably accurate reflection of a material world. The field of this reflection is The Mind.

The foundation of the inner world is pure un-formed Awareness: infinitely supple unformed Awareness. This unformed Awareness is the foundation of all life. Its existence is the fruit of molecular order, and in the maintenance of that order it must access and mine external forms.

This dependence upon the mining of external forms for sustenance results in the emergence of Mind. And Mind is the driver of the sophistication of form.

By the time we get to creatures such as human beings Mind has, in its quest for sustenance, developed layers of complexity leading up to a sublimely effective behavioral property: consciousness.

Though a tool of extraordinary efficacy, consciousness is the outer-most layer of Awareness and patently superficial ('superficial' as in 'surface' not as in 'without merit') . And this surface of The Mind is brilliantly reflective. So reflective in fact, that there exists an entire spectrum of Mind that is so autonomously effective in its process that in the light of ordinary consciousness it is invisible. We now have a name for it: The Unconscious Mind.

The point of this excursion is to point out that all aspects of Mind are superficial to Awareness.

If our identity is in Mind then our identity is superficial

Nature

 

Nature does the savagely joyful busy-work, refining the rainbow expression of Awareness

The Intent of Existence

Anyone, regardless of their level of confusion, will have to admit that there is an Existence. Even if we decline to paste a conceptualization on it there exists an Existence. Because there is an existence there exists inevitability. Inevitabilities engender the existence of atoms. Atoms are an agglomeration of affinities, and affinities make the formation of molecules inevitable. The field phenomenon generated by the behavior of electrons in certain complex molecules result in what is known as Awareness, and Awareness has an agenda.

The polytheists of old had noticed that there were categories of intent that infused and subsumed the will of humanity, and they gave to these categories of intent a term: "The Will of the Gods". Well, the will of the gods is simply the inherent intentions of nature. Proliferation and all that it implies, even in a biologically advanced creature comprise the foundational intentions that influence what is imagined to be the will.

The Zen doctrine of No Mind is a form of house cleaning. When we have silenced the inclinations of nature in the halls of the mind we then directly experience the intention of Existence, and experiencing the intent of Existence will directly influence the will.

The intent of Existence is Awareness.

The Shock of the Absurd

The existential silence we enjoy in meditation opens a door to a remarkably complete understanding of the ultimate nature of Existence, of Life, and of humanity. And such an understanding lays bare the absurd presumptions which are the foundation of humanity's relationship to the field of its existence.

The temporal center of my high-school years was 1960, and in a high-school science class we were made familiar with the classic fruit-fly experiment where a male and a female fruit-fly are introduced into a five gallon jar with five pounds of sugar. The population expands exponentially and then crashes to zero. There is still plenty of sugar left.

The Earth is our jar, and we are the fruit-flies. and some of the more precocious flies want to somehow breach the lid of our jar and escape the mess we have made of it into.....what

We have king fruit-flies and queen fruit-flies, and industrial magnate fruit-flies, and garden variety fruit-flies, and we all busily go about our business smashing things that aught not be smashed, and solving problems that don't exist while ignoring problems of existential immediacy.

It is absurd.

The period of the great masters of Zen was roughly 1,500 years ago. To Awaken in those days of rustic simplicity resulted in a chasm of being between the animal human and the awakened creature of whom it is the larva stage. The absurdity of tribal presumptions and the inconceivable natural beauty of existence are simply self evident when as living organisms we enter the sacred realm of Awakened Pristine Awareness.

The charming absurdity of those rustic years has descended into catastrophe. But the opportunity for Awakening can not be distanced

The Fog of Normalcy

Strolling the garden of the regional governor, an ancient master remarked "Your Highness, when the people of the world look upon these flowers, they see them as if in a dream."

The fog of normalcy blurs the sharp outlines and brilliant colors of ever unfolding Eternity. 

A famous teacher from the early twentieth century stressed the importance of fresh impressions.

All impressions are fresh impressions

Enchantment

Common to all cultures, tales of enchantment find us looking into a mirror that is looking into a mirror back into the dimmest reaches of human narrative. These tales speak of one will becoming the sleeping slave of another for good or for ill. These tales tend to be cautionary or explanatory.

The nephew of Sigmund Freud, Edward Burnays, has been considered the father of modern advertising and propaganda. He realized that Frued's discovery of human primitive psychological imperatives could be used to induce subconscious motivations and mental imprinting. In the early nineteen hundreds he began a concerted effort to develop techniques of psychological manipulation at industrial scale. It's like playing a piano: press the keys and a chord is struck, and our will unknowingly falls into possession of forces not our own, but which call themselves by our name.

When Pristine Awareness awakens it is glaringly obvious that many of the dominant prods to ordinary everyday behavior are naturally occurring forms of enchantment. In fact it could be said that awakening from the enchantment natural to creature hood is the very fact of Satori.

With the awakening of Pristine Awareness the liberated natural energies of the animal become a magic wand of creativity.

Nature's Default State

The default state of nature has been described as "The Law of the Jungle"

In the absence of a moral culture any society will naturally revert to nature's default state

Personal Existence: Post Satori

The allegory of "The Ten Bulls" has been part of the lore of Zen for over one thousand years. The bull of "The Ten Bulls" allegory is actually a water buffalo commonly used in Asia as a general purpose beast of burden. Hauling wagons, plowing rice paddies, loaded up with packs, and ridden with saddles, the water buffalo was (and is) reliable, strong, and tough. And for all its strength and utility it was not uncommon in my years in rural Asia to find one with the ring in it's nose tied to a light cord, docile and led down a dirt road by a child.

Post Satori: Pristine Awareness finds its Self in possession of a rather extraordinary vehicle of expression.

When asked about his next incarnation an ancient master replied,

"I'll come back as a buffalo down the mountain"

Stating his purpose: to come back as a beast of burden for good of the people.

The Fakir's Bed

The Hindu fakir on his bed of nails is the perfect simile for a common condition of mind.

We make of vexations great and small an intellectual-emotional bed of nails upon which to lie.

Each nail forged from the iron of rectitude.

Moral Compass

An animal has no need of a compass

Themes and Memes

For many years I eked out a living painting in oils. Landscapes, city streets, portraits, I have done them all, and in every case I considered the voice of the moment my subject matter. I would layout the basic framework (like framing a house) mixing estimates of color with blends of the primaries: red, blue, and yellow. With these and some white and black I was able to block out a structure to paint into with subtle admonitions of color, and was generally able to achieve my purpose. Red, Blue, and Yellow: the 'primaries' from which all colors are woven. 

Just so human nature.

Homer's "Iliad", Mallory's "Mort de Arthur", Murasaki's "Genji Monogatari", have stood the test of time because they are raw examples of the primary colors of human experience: the the romance of sex and violence and matters of 'honor' is alive and well in every driver behind the wheel of every car on every freeway anywhere in the world. Humanity finds its Self framed out in broad strokes of archetype and personalized with finish-work of adaptive color.

The awakening of Pristine Awareness is as if the canvas awoke.

The Facade

It is quite a shock to ones intellectual system should one awaken in Pristine Awareness. The facade built by millennia of human cleverness exists as an all but impenetrable barrier to an accurate understanding of the personhood. Awareness is born into a world of intact, deeply evolved, rationalizations of animal archetype. Naked raw instinct is everywhere and in every circumstance cloaked in the colorful patchwork of cultural bric-a-brac which is the narrative upon which we build a personality. We say "I" to these antique prods to behavior and play our part in the maintenance and refinement of the facade. 

This is not a bad thing for these narratives are adaptive mechanisms protecting the orderly progress of creature hood as Pristine Awareness, vining on the armature of nature, explores its way to the full bloom of Awakened-ness. One can see that systems bent on the refinement of the personality are like polishing a mud ball, but even the most exquisite porcelain figure was once a ball of mud.

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An ancient master when asked "What is Buddha?" replied

the one in the shrine

The Good

In Western theology and philosophy volumes have been written about the 'Good'. What is 'Good'. How does one achieve 'The Good'? And so on and on. All this implies that there is a 'Good' out there somewhere, and that this 'Good' is an achievable and admirable human aspiration.

Let us compare this 'Good' to an explication of 'The Meaning Saturated Gestalt'.

Life is the author of meaning. Where there is no life there is no meaning, just an infinite cosmic pool table: things bouncing off of each other with mathematically describable trajectories. It is events without cessation and without meaning, because meaning is a value determination and the beginning of life is the birth of value. Once the field phenomenon of Pristine Awareness comes into being, entropy is experienced as a negative value or as the carrier of extractable value. Once life comes into being the gestalt of physical trajectory is suddenly saturated with meaning.

As life forms feed on extractable elements of the Universal Gestalt what is 'Good' is what furthers. By the time we get to sophisticated nervous systems a concept of 'Good' spontaneously emerges. It is good to eat, it is bad to be eaten, metaphorically or otherwise. We find the gestalt saturated with meaning and the meanings we derive define us.

Know the organism by what it feeds upon. There is no evil that is not private good.

Some men rob you with a six gun, and some with a fountain pen, and some with entropy laden philosophies.

Satori 2.0

Whether found in a paramecium or a person, Awareness is spontaneously entropy dissipating.

Satori is that precise moment when Pristine Awareness wakes up to animal mind as entropy.

Satori and Dis-Integration

The ancient masters of Zen stressed the absolute necessity of Satori.

Every creature is an expression of the field phenomenon that I refer to as 'Pristine Awareness'. Pristine Awareness is the 'I AM' of all life, but this universal 'I AM', has in the process of self refinement, naturally produced the 'I am' of creature-hood. Pristine Awareness emerges, integrated from the womb with a full compliment of responses adequate to the needs of the animal, and humans are no exception: we are ruled by nature.

It appears to me that the entire ascent of life forms from the earliest single-celled to hominids is the press of the Universe to Self-Awareness. What I refer to as the awakening of Pristine Awareness was called by the ancient masters of Zen 'Enlightenment'. This awakening is no less than the denouement of the universe's drive to know its Self. And this is where Satori comes in.

The field phenomenon of Pristine Awareness comes on board fully integrated with the lesser field of animal mind and innocently accepts as its Self the selfness common to the animal which is its vehicle of expression. Satori is the explicit moment, strikingly self-evident, of dis integration 

Satori is that moment in the sands of time when one, having crossed the storm tossed ocean of nature, awakens into a sea of light. As if awakening from some hypnotic trance Pristine Awareness has come to its Self, and is no longer seamlessly integrated into animal selfness. The hypnotized slave has awakened as master.

The waves are the water. We are the waves. We are the water. In a split second, like flicking a light switch, we have come home to what we were all along.

This is Satori

This is the difference between a puppet and a dance master.

The Invisible Man

The multifaceted slow-motion catastrophe in progress on Planet Earth is the knock-on effect of an intellectually capable creature trapped in spiritual infancy. Humanities inflated self appraisal imagines its Self as separate, August, lord over and above the natural world: Pristine Awareness which is the "I AM" of all life is in Humanity a feral infant tearing at the womb of nature.

Humanity is invisible to itself, and like some motion picture vampire can not see its reflection. Like hairline cracks leading back to some point of impact, all of the problems: social, political, ecological, lead back to the same simple fact.

Humanity is invisible to its Self.

Meditation as a tool of awakening Pristine Awareness  (known to ancient masters as Enlightenment) is one way that an individual can, of them selves, make a difference.

The Purveyors of Sensation

The CARNIVAL! The festival of the flesh, what's not to like?

We are led and driven in life by sensation. The existential needs of the animal express themselves in sensation: hunger, thirst, varieties of comfort, the list goes on and on. Sensation is external to Pristine Awareness and yet elemental to the survival of its corporeal expression. It could be posited that all animal behavior is a response to sensation, and the statement "I want this, I need this" is a tacit admission that this wanting is external (though perhaps essential) to this "I".

Of necessity sensation is baked into our repertoire of behavioral norms, and this makes us vulnerable to manipulation by psychological parasites. The transparent cynicism of carny front-men comes to mind, and the "sensational" appeal of extravaganza, religious and secular. In his autobiography the American artist Thomas Hart Benton casually remarks that "The wealthy are dependent upon artists for the paraphernalia of their pretensions." Which is to say that a certain category of art produces a certain complex of psychological sensations for a certain social class. From the subtle to the gross we find everywhere the imprimatur of sensation.

Meditation is the cultivation of the silent Self which is the true litmus of the bitter and the sweet.

The Sacred and the Profane

Religions tend to crystallize around an assumption that there exists a realm of the Divine which must be sought out, sought after, and that one should find ones Self in subordination to the realm of the sacred. The supposition implied here is that there exists a pedestrian realm, a profane realm, that exists in parallel with the sacred, and that one must appeal to to the Divine in supplication, worship, and devotion in order to have access to this miraculous realm.

There is no separation. The motion of nature is like a child's merry-go-round: the Divinity of existence in a whorl that confutes the efficacies of Awareness.

Hence the inestimable value of meditation.

A grain of sand is a hurricane of Divinity.

The Light of Warp and Weft

An opening bud, flowers into the light of the sun which is the source of its existence

Pristine Awareness awakens into that vibrant Awareness which is the fabric of all that exists

Consciousness vis a vis Awareness

Consciousness is an event, Pristine Awareness is a phenomenon 

Being, Doing, and Enlightenment

Being is the expression of Suchness, and in the realm of the living, Doing is the imperative of Being: if there were no doing there would be no being. And we find that through millions upon millions of years Awareness (which is the stuff of life) has in its doing, refined its capacities of being toward the full flowering of Pristine Awareness: the awakening of the Universe to its Self.

The Being of any life form is woven of capacities and limitations, and we can recognize the character of any animal by its Doing. In the cultural histories of humanity's doing we find two dominant threads. One of them is the violence universally found in natural systems, and in that natural violence the cleverness of humanity has found a home for its animal genius. The other thread is the press of Pristine Awareness to Self realization, and this is the foundation of religion and philosophy.

The genius of religion and philosophy is not an animal genius: it is the pressure of Pristine Awareness seeking that liberation which is the flower of its Awakening.

This flowering has been called "Enlightenment"

The Athletes of Asceticism

The freedom which accompanies the awakening of Pristine Awareness is often mistaken for asceticism. But the ascetic is a spiritual athlete tying him or her self to a mental image, and successful asceticism is an achievement.

Of itself Pristine Awareness is free from the busyness of achievement, and the categories of freedom peculiar to Enlightenment must remain unknown to the athletes of asceticism.

The case of Niu-t'ou Fa-yung (d.657) is instructive in this regard.

Stimulus Response

The awakening of Pristine Awareness does not dispel the autonomous activity of the ancient imprinting of instinct. Like an old fashioned player-piano the air we breathe is used to play the timeless tunes of animal stimulus-response. The false self innocently hallucinated by the conscious mind dances to this tune and innocently imagines its self to be its author.

Meditation provides a foundation of silence making it possible for Pristine Awareness to awaken and to recognize that it is being played. This engenders an entirely new relationship with the Real, and with the vital energies of the animal.

The Mind becomes the Magic Gem, and the body the Magic Carpet. 

The "self" of Consciousness and the Beauty of Zen

The "self" of consciousness is an hallucination, and it is natural that this hallucination would say "I" to the antique bric-a-brac which are the accouterments of nature's press into the Universe's appetite for Self discovery.

The beauty of Zen is not just its unrelenting insistence on the awakening of Pristine Awareness. There is in the vast literature of and about Zen a preparation for the shock that accompanies an awakening from said hallucination.

Nothing is as it seems, nor is it otherwise, and in the analects of Zen we find a treasure trove: the natal utterance of newly awakened beings. My personal favorite will always be that of Lin Chi (d.907) who's master was the legendary Huang Po (d.850)

Lin-chi to Tai-yu

"So after all, there is not much in the Buddhism of Huang Po"

He then returned to his master.

Limbic Imagination

Every creature survives by exploiting its environment whether amoeba among the parameciums or deer in the shrubbery, and in this way life has leveraged its way from single cells to anthropoids. With the advent of complex nervous systems we find the extraordinary exploitive advantage of imagination. Flint knapping and till-and-sow are means of exploitation and are products of the imagination. 

Every expansion of facility broadens opportunities for exploitation, and an imagination operating in the absence of a moral culture will find in human society a rich field supine to exploitation.

The lizard brain reptilians live amongst us. It turns out they are just otherwise ordinary human beings without a conscience.

Culture and the Winds of Chaos

All culture is performative, and these "performances" are the naturally emerging signifiers that glue together groups of every stripe: protecting the ordered satisfaction of creaturely needs from the winds of chaos.

Equalibrium

Pristine Awareness has one aspiration: "Contentment". Disturbance of the field of "Contentment" gives rise to "The Spirit of Inquiry" and all behavior rises from this foundation.

Equilibrium is the essence of achievement.

Othering

I was reading an article today about "Othering". The article concerned the natural human division of "Us" and "Them" in communities and cultures.

But it made me think of humanity in general and the inconceivably varied voice of life its self

The Legacy of the Imbeciles

Though now popular terms of disparagement, Idiot, Imbecile, and Moron started life as diagnostics terms.

The Idiot has the intellectual capacity of a normal human age two or three.

Your Imbecile rises to the level expected of a four to seven year old.

And the Moron tops out age ten.

It tears ones heart to encounter a creature bearing such challenges in the complex world in which we find ourselves.

It tears at ones mind to find them in positions of great responsibility.

Substance and Form

Pristine Awareness is substance, consciousness is form.